Late last week, Nokia dropped what many consider to be a bomb on the WebM project: a list of patents that VP8 supposedly infringes in the form of an IETF IPR declaration. The list has made the rounds around the web, often reported as proof that VP8 infringes upon Nokia's patents. All this stuff rang a bell. Haven't we been here before? Yup, we have, with another open source codec called Opus. Qualcomm and Huawei made the same claims as Nokia did, but they turned out to be complete bogus. As it turns out, this is standard practice in the dirty business of the patent licensing industry.

Wrong, I didn't say it wasn't competitive, I actually said that BOTH were acceptable in a sibling thread!

What I said was that x264 tends to produce better results on objective metrics, and supplied some data to show this for a given profile setting.

How is this worse than what you did: claiming VP8 was better with zero evidence? So it's bias in the case where I provide data, but not bias where you provide none?

No, it is bias in the case where you say you did not claim h.264 was better when you did, and you also saying that I claimed VP8 was better when I did not. I said multiple times that one could get VP8 to perform as well as h.624 ... claiming "as well as" is not claiming "better".

"The actual truth is that these two codecs by objective measurements (e.g. PSNR, SSIM) have very little difference.

Define "very little"? Some of these metrics are based a logarithmic scale "

"Very little difference" would be the words of some people who have performed test, and others involved in blind testing of subjective quality.

Each release has brought improvements over the previous version. We are now quite a way ahead of the original release, and the improvements since have been substantial.

" By subjective measurements I believe that VP8 is the (slightly) preferred codec, but most people cannot really tell the difference.

You're free to believe that. "

Of course I am. I have good reason to believe it too, since the original VP8 release was thought to be better (subjectively) than h.264 in 15% of cases, and it has been substantially improved five times since then.

" How is it not bias to rant and rave when someone questions your dubious (and provably false) claim that h.264 was better by every performance measure?

I didn't claim it was better by every performance measure, I just presented evidence that showed x264 was better (for the defined experiment). I don't think there was any ranting or raving involved. "